I Have a Dream Inc: is King's estate cashing in on his legacy?

The words remain as powerful and inspirational today as they were to the people who heard them on that hot summer evening 40 years ago.

"I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice," the Rev Martin Luther King told 250,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington on 28 August 1963. "I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today."

As people across America celebrate the anniversary of that seminal address, a collection of more than 7,000 items of Dr King's writings, books, letters and financial records - including a typed draft of the "Dream" speech - are to be sold by his estate in a controversial auction that could raise more than $30m (£19m). Critics say the auction is further evidence of the King family's willingness to cash in on the civil rights leader's memory.

"These days it is increasingly difficult to remember that the King family was once held in such high esteem. They are mostly known now for their relentless profiteering," wrote Cynthia Tucker, a columnist with the Atlanta Journal- Constitution, the newspaper of Dr King's home city. "The heirs have converted King's legacy into a profit centre - I Have a Dream Inc."

The archive, currently being displayed in New York by Sotheby's, contains books, notebooks, sermons, letters, invitations, index cards, church financial statements and a ribbon-tied packet of letters that he had written to his widow, Coretta Scott King, during their courtship. The margins of many of the documents are filled with hand-written comments and annotations.

Among the items on display are a college exam book in which he received a C for public speaking, a draft of the speech he gave in 1964 upon receiving the Nobel peace prize, the hand-corrected proof of a Playboy magazine interview and personal notes that he scribbled after the assassination of President John F Kennedy in 1963. There are also papers discovered in Dr King's briefcase after he too was assassinated, at a motel in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968.

But perhaps the most remarkable is a draft of the "Dream" speech he gave on the marble steps of the memorial, surrounded by supporters who had "marched on Washington" and watchful police, and with a federal official on hand, ready to pull the plug on his microphone if it was deemed his comments were likely to "incite violence".

The speech - which would be followed a year later by the signing into law of the Civil Rights Act by President Lyndon Johnson and 13 months after that by the Voting Rights Act - was originally entitled "Normalcy - Never Again". The key passage is missing from the draft that was typed up the night before at the city's Willard Hotel: Dr King added it extemporaneously as he addressed the crowd.

"This transcends almost any other archive, particularly when you deal with American history," said David Redden, vice-chairman of Sotheby's, which will only sell the archive as a whole. "This is one of the most important non-presidential archives of the 20th century. It must be kept together to be useful to scholars."

Dr King's estate has refused to comment on the sale and inquiries to The King Centre museum in Atlanta yesterday went unanswered. Its website says that it seeks donations to help its work. It says: "The King Centre graciously accepts your donations to assist with our mission to educate the world about the life, work, and legacy of Dr Martin Luther King, and deliver his teachings to current and future generations."

Critics say this is not the first time his estate has tried to cash in on his legacy. In 1997, the estate signed a deal with what was then Time Warner to produce new books of Dr King's writings, family memoirs and recordings of his speeches as well as an internet site. The deal earns the estate an annual $10m. Some time after that the estate signed a multimillion-dollar deal with a French telecommunications company and the US telecom group Cingular, which allowed them to use a portion of the "Dream" speech in their advertisements.

That the estate is making money from Dr King's legacy is not what angers critics, but rather the aggression with which it has challenged anyone who seeks to use any part of his work without a licence. In the mid-1990s the family was involved in a lengthy dispute with the National Park Service over an alternative museum in Atlanta while the estate has sued the USA Today newspaper for reprinting the "Dream" speech in full and CBS for using extended excerpts of the speech, which it had originally broadcast live in 1963.

The result, say some critics, is that scholars and historians have had only limited access to important material. The King estate has been slow to publicly defend its actions. In a rare interview with The New York Times in 1997, Dr King's third son, Dexter, who is president of The King Centre, said the estate had been left in a "very precarious position because we had no instructions". He added: "My father did not leave a will to say, 'I do or do not want my intellectual property protected'. All we had to go on was his conduct.

"It has nothing to do with greed. It has to do with the principle that if you make a dollar, I should make a dime."

Experts are divided as to what Dr King would have wanted. Some point to the fact that he donated all of his $54,000 Nobel prizemoney to charity, despite appeals of his wife to put it toward their children's education. Others point out that he copyrighted his work and sued a company that released a recording of his 1963 speech without obtaining his permission.

Where there is agreement is as to the lasting power of Dr King's speech. Drew Hansen, author of The Dream: Martin Luther King and the Speech that inspired a Nation, told The Independent: "What remains 40 years later, is the power of its words, the lyricism of the delivery and, most importantly, the vision of America's redemption. It is as important as the Gettysburg Address or the Declaration of Independence."

FOUR DECADES ON: THE UNREALISED DREAM

Four decades after Martin Luther King delivered one of the most memorable speeches in American history, the dream he envisioned remains only partly realised. In 1963, much of the American South remained unofficially segregated, with blacks and whites using separate restaurants and water fountains. Only eight years had passed since Rosa Parks had refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white passenger, a move that led to the scrapping of segregation laws.

At the start of the 21st century, the position of Secretary of State is held by an African American. There are black politicians on Capitol Hill, black mayors and a growing black middle class. But there has yet to be a black president and racial equality persists in many areas of daily life.

"We must look at the conditions in America today," said Dr King's eldest son, Martin Luther King III. "Forty-five million people have no health insurance, five million are homeless, black men earn 60 cents to the dollar earned by a white man, black women 70 cents. We have to work to make his dream become a reality."

Black unemployment stands at 11.8 per cent compared with 5.1 per cent for whites. More than half of the prison population is black while black people account for 13 per cent of the population as a whole. About 9.9 per cent of white people live beneath the poverty line, compared with 22.7 per cent of the black population. While almost 89 per cent of white students spend at least four years at high school, for blacks the figure is 79 per cent.

Julian Bond, chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), who attended the March on Washington that concluded with Dr King's speech, said: "African Americans and racial minorities are better off in many respects in 2003 than was true in 1963. Having said that, remember that for Martin Luther King, this was a dream, and it remains an unrealised dream today. There are still enormous disparities - in education, income, life-expectancy."